Word: buendia
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DIED. Manuel Buendia, 58, Mexico's leading syndicated political columnist, whose feisty front-page commentary in Mexico City's daily Excelsior frequently exposed corruption and criminality in the higher levels of the government, labor and business, and regularly attacked CIA involvement in Latin America; of gunshot wounds (while entering a parking lot, he was shot at least three times in the back by an assassin who escaped in the crowded streets); in Mexico City. His columns, which had recently zeroed in on corruption in the oil industry and its powerful union, had provoked several death threats...
...Solitude, for example, the fictional village of Macondo, founded by the Buendia family, starts as a green Eden, then falls victim to collective amnesia, a Yanqui fruit company, catastrophic rains and inexplicable bouts of incest before being reclaimed by the jungle. When the beautiful and maddeningly virtuous Remedies Buendia is suddenly levitated heavenward while folding bedclothes, her sister-in-law merely grumbles that the sheets, which also rose, are lost forever. Central to all this is a compression of time, taut with comic invention, in which old tales and contemporary terrors are joined. The opening sentence of Solitude is typical...
This kind of time is mythic, biblical, fairy tale time. In a mysterious way it preserves instead of oppressing; the men of Leaf Storm and No One Writes to the Colonel--not a Buendia among them--are all slaves of a destructive sort of time. The remnants of Aureliano's revolutionary army are tricked into waiting paralyzed for a promised pension that never arrives. The whole town waits for death--the individual or collective crisis that might give them a sense of direction, something to fight against--and when death comes it comes as an anticlimax. The "leaf storm...
...searches in vain for the raffish Macondo of One Hundred Years of Solitude-modeled on the banana boom town of Aracataca, where the author was born. Macondophiles will at least learn some new bits and pieces about the place. The action starts with a note from Colonel Aureliano Buendia, the great revolutionary warrior who returns in Solitude, and the recluse Rebeca also makes an ectoplasmic appearance...
...range and length, the book is satisfyingly cohesive where it might be sprawling. The key to this unity is Garcia Márquez's treatment of time. Consider the superb opening sentence: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." Such compression of time makes the novel taut with a sense of fate. Atavistic dictates of blood must be followed. Premonitions invariably come true. A series of coded predictions, written when Macondo was still young, are deciphered only when every prediction...